Scan day came and went (all is well with my brain). All the scans begin to run together now, at this safe distance from crisis. I’m old hat now, used to scans to the point that I can argue with technicians about what I should be allowed to wear during them. The last time I had an MRI, I folded my pants legs up under the gown so they wouldn’t see I’d kept them on.

I didn’t think of wearing pants that could do that today, so I was at the mercy of the technician who had to tie my gown in the back (WTF?). They placed my IV in the tiny cubicle of a dressing room, of all places. Nothing was going as I remembered it back in the days when I went for scans at NYU. I felt a little resentment, a little rebellion starting to simmer, just at the moment when I needed to be marshaling my Zen state for the twenty minutes I’d be inside the tube. Maybe it was a little bit of my father fighting to be heard, to be remembered on this important day. (In the hospital he put up quite a struggle at various times.) No one offered me any scan music today that I could have declined. It was just me, lying down inside of a construction site’s worth of noises, and as usual, almost falling asleep by the end.

Oh, I did add an innovation to make the time pass in the tube today — Kegels. A friend posted to Facebook the other day her to-do list from immediate post-partum days when she was endeavoring to do a hundred of them a day. I used to do a lot of them, because they were part of the routine at the gym in Brooklyn where I took a lot of classes. Since moving, I haven’t yet found my exercise groove, and the renovation sort of disrupted my search for one, so the Kegels fell by the wayside. (Can one in fact do Kegels by the wayside? I’ll have to try that.) Recent biological developments indicate to me that my body seems to be heading down a one-way street towards incipient old-ladyhood — wholly unrelated to cancer and 100% not remarkable, but definitely annoying. So today, during my enforced relaxation, in lieu of listening to samba (which I have done in the past, when I was offered music) or taking a mental tour of the hallways of my old elementary school (which was amazing), I did Kegels. I was aiming for a hundred, holding each one for a count of five like I used to do at the gym. I think I got up to seventy-five by the time the scan ended. I only got one warning via intercom that my head was moving slightly. I considered that a success.

Feeling emboldened tonight by my good scan results, I engaged in a little ill-advised trawling for updated brain metastases of melanoma survival statistics on Google. I have never, ever made a habit of this, because as a former librarian I know better than to freak myself out by scanning biomedical literature I can sort of understand on its surface, but which I might totally fail to put into context. In addition to which is the fact that we don’t live or die by statistics. I am more focused on the results of my own tests. I think that if I’d made a habit of reading and internalizing journal articles from the moment I was diagnosed, I would have lost much more sleep at night, imagining myriad outcomes, not all of them mine.

Ironically, the first article I found didn’t tell me all that much I didn’t know. The treatment landscape has changed, and so have the survival rates. Every day that someone like me wakes up still healthy is another data point for the world. I am not in possession of at least one of the factors associated with significantly reduced overall survival, which is “male sex.” I spun this information in a positive way for myself, since I haven’t exactly been thrilled of late to be dealing with “female sex” stuff.

I also noticed that the treatment I have followed/swallowed since 2015, which is a combination targeted therapy of BRAF/MEK inhibitors, was associated with the shortest median overall survival rate after brain metastases were diagnosed (12.7 months). I have now quadrupled that survival rate. I guess I’m happy to do a deep dive into the medical literature, if it confirms what I already suspect about myself — that I am a lucky, lucky person, and a medical anomaly besides. I wish that researchers could figure out the secret to my success and make it propagate to others. Is it all the chocolate?

It was a pretty eventful day after my scan, because I had to finish proofing some translation work with a deadline of today, and because I had to drive to the airport in the afternoon to pick up J, who returned from twelve days in Thailand, on a solo trip celebrating his Significant Birthday (because he didn’t want a party). We missed him terribly around here, and we’re so happy to have him back. He took a couple of cooking classes there, so I am looking forward to homemade curry, and I’m looking into planting morning glories — for flowers, but also, apparently, to eat. I’m grateful to have a break from scans now until my CT in June. For now, I can go back to the rhythms of a life mostly untroubled by cancer, never entirely forgetting how lucky I am to have that option.